On Friday night last week, I was fed up with the Graffiti "Classic" recognition on my Tungsten E. Before bed, I removed the Brando screen cover, figuring the it might be dampening my strokes on the Graffiti area. No such luck: the plain screen of my TE improved my text entry very little. Argh.

After some flirtation with FITALY on Saturday, I knew this wasn't the answer for me either. I know many swear by this technology, but it always seems to get me with its steep learning curve, and the feeling that I'm pecking like a wild chicken on my handheld.

On Sunday, at church, I chatted with Sandy, who now owns my old Clié N610. During our discussion, I wrote some Graffiti on her Clié and was amazed at how responsive and accurate it was. I started to realize that the Clié had a piece of Scotch Satin tape applied to the Graffiti area. This gave me an idea: what about applying some Scotch tape over the Graffiti area on my TE? It was cheap, and at that point, I had little to lose.

So, on Sunday evening, I applied a ceremonial piece of 3/4" Scotch Satin Finish GiftWrap Tape (purple package) and was surprised and delighted at the improvement in my Graffiti entry! Amazing!

I don't know if the smoother surface or stabilization of the protective touchscreen was the key. Frankly, I don't care, because my responsive Grafitti Classic is back! :-)

SiEdI was also busily updating my Writing, Text Editing & Word Processing Guide for PalmSource Expert Guides, when I remembered a freeware text editor called SiEd that Sammy McLoughlin had mentioned a few weeks back. This is a plain text editor (not Palm Doc) which means it can open and modify plain text files (up to 64k) on your SD card or Memory Stick. Very Cool!

I found SiEd at FreewarePalm.com and gave it a try. SiEd worked so well, it's earned a spot among my permanent Palm OS apps. It's limited to 64k plaintext files, but hey, even with that limit I can see many uses for SiEd. Many thanks to the author, Benjamin Roe, for making his great little tool available to us.

Reader Comments (2)

Tom,

Duly noted and good to be aware of about the tape and dead spots danger. I've never had a problem removing tape, though in several cases I've never needed to -- they've lasted as long as I've used my Palm devices. The only exception was my foolish incident of using Windex on my Cli� last year, because I wanted a prettier looking slice of tape. :-)